As our learned readers well know, the medical practice of the ancients was, as that of the Orientals still is, more peculiar than scientific. When disease was thought to be a divine punishment for sin, it was held to be wicked to resist by calling in human aid: thus Asa was blamed, and thus Moslems and Spaniards resign themselves to their fate, distrusting, and very properly, their medical men: “Am I a god, to kill or make alive?” In the large towns, in these days of progress, some patients may “suffer a recovery” according to European practice; but in the country and remote villages,--and we speak from repeated personal experience,--the good old reliance on relics and charms is far from exploded; and however Dr. Sangrado and Philip III., whose decrees on medical matters yet adorn the Spanish statutes at large, deplore the introduction of perplexing chemistry, mineral therapeuticals still remain a considerable dead letter, as the church has transferred the efficacy of faith from spiritual to temporal concerns, and gun-shot wounds. Even Ponz, the Lysons of Spain, and before the Inquisition was abolished, ventured to express surprise at the number of images ascribed to St. Luke, who, says he, was not a sculptor, but a physician, whence possibly their sanative influence. The old Iberians were great herbalist doctors; thus those who had a certain plant in their houses, were protected, as a blessed palm branch now wards off lightning. They had also a drink made of a hundred herbs, and hence called _centum herbæ_, a _bebida de cien herbas_, which, like Morison’s vegetable pills, cured every possible disease, and was so palatable that it was drunk at banquets, which modern physic is not; moreover, according to Pliny, they cured the gout with flour, and relieved elongated uvulas by hanging purslain round the patient’s throat. So now the _curas y curanderos_, country curates and quacks, furnish charms and incantations, just as Ulysses stopped his bleeding by cantation: a medal of Santiago cures the ague, a handkerchief of the Virgin the ophthalmia, a bone of San Magin answers all the purposes of mercury, a scrap of San Frutos supplied at Segovia the loss of common sense; the Virgin of Oña destroyed worms in royal Infantes, and her sash at Tortosa delivers royal Infantas. Every Murcian peasant believes that no disease can affect him or his cattle, if he touches them with the cross of Caravaca, which angels brought from heaven and placed on a red cow. When we were last at Manresa, the worthy man who showed the cave in which Loyola the founder of the Jesuits did penance for a year, increased an honest livelihood by the sale of its pulverized stones, that were swallowed by the faithful in cases in which an English doctor would prescribe Dover’s or James’s powders. Every province, not to say parish, has its own tutelar saint and relic, which are much honoured and resorted to in their local jurisdiction, and very